Sumit SinghalSumit Singhal loves modern architecture. He comes from a family of builders who have built more than 20 projects in the last ten years near Delhi in India. He has recently started writing about the architectural projects that catch his imagination.

Saijo Clinic in Tokyo, Japan by Aida Atelier, Inc.

Saijo Clinic is a private mental health clinic with short-care/group-care programs on the 11th floor penthouse of a building facing Shinjuku Gyoen Park, 58ha urban park located in central Tokyo. The penthouse was originally built as a part of a gigantic signboard on rooftop. The sign graphic was later abolished by newly introduced landscape regulations, however, the space inside was left over. In designing the interior of the clinic, we sought to incorporate the extraordinary contrast between different urban scales.

While treating the skyline of buildings and vast green as borrowed landscape, we proposed a clinic as the continuum of simple huts. In other words, it is a clinic as comfortable as a small rural house, and yet floating in the heart of metropolis. Those huts take various forms of relationship each other: interlocking, adjacent or nested. It does not only provide a solution for the complex program of the clinic but also becomes a spatial representation of the concept of the clinic to obscure the boundary of the treatment field and daily life. Furthermore, views of vast urban panorama framed by square windows of the intimate huts would constantly destabilize the sense of place, providing both comfort and surprise.